Clueless Amtrak bureaucrats kill a DC Streetcar connector, in order to preserve ROW for an insane $100+ billion HSR vaporware project:
Back in April, the District Department of Transportation’s point man on streetcars, Scott Kubly, assured the denizens of H Street NE that they were still working with Amtrak to run the western end of the streetcar underneath the railroad tracks, creating a direct connection to Union Station and transit links to the rest of the city.
Not long after, however, Amtrak started saying “no,” citing a desire to preserve space for high-speed rail infrastructure in its long-range master plan—if it ever gets funded. Now, it looks like DDOT’s preferred option is dead, and with it the District’s hope of hitching the streetcar directly to Metro.
Plan “B” now is to dump streetcar passengers way out in a parking lot.
Idiots. There is no reason to reserve any ROW for HSR anywhere in the District: any sensible NE HSR routing must diverge from the current NEC ROW at the absolute closest somewhere in Prince George’s County–although the proximity of Baltimore and Washington suggests that it will actually be better to interline HSR and regional services on a 4-track express/local main between those two cities, and have the separate HSR ROW diverge from the local line out about 10 miles NE of Baltimore and reconverge just north of Philadelphia International Airport (for the 30th Street Station lead), with a second interlined segment between Philly and NYC, due to the PRR ROW being extremely straight as it is, and the second major divergence being NE of NYC, to avoid the ridiculously curvilinear Shore Line ROW.
Reserving the space is thus wasting it.
One bureaucracy telling another bureaucracy to get lost. Seriously, that’s a real lost opportunity since the move means that there’s one less transportation connection option. The move could also be yet another indication of America falling further behind. The Germans and the Japanese have already figured out a way to connect local transportation to intercity trains. Sad.